This post is a collection of some notes, facts and basic information about Dynamics CRM Organisation, Business Units, Users and Teams entities and business data model. This can be used as a quick introduction to these specific entities:

• An organization is the top level of Dynamics CRM hierarchy. This entity cannot be customised.
• Announcements are alerts sent to all users in an organisation.
• Announcements are represented by the BusinessUnitNewsArticle entity.
• Business unit is a unit of the top-level organization and can be parents of other business units (child business units).
• First business unit created for an organization is called the root business unit and cannot be deleted.
• Other business units can be deleted in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (was not possible in CRM 4.0).
• An entity can be owned by organisation, business unit owned, user owned, team owned or No ownership by any other entity.
• An entity is normally owned by user or team owned as this allows individual and teams ownership and allow applying Security roles onto it.
• Ownership for an entity is defined in the metadata property OwnershipType.
• Each user corresponds to a user in the Active Directory for that organization
• Users can be disabled but they cannot be deleted.
• Each user must be associated with only one business unit
• You must assign the user to at least one security role. Even if the user is part of a team that has assigned
• Teams can be deleted in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
• Each team must be associated with only one business unit.
• A team can include users from any business unit, not only the business unit with which the team is associated.
• Non-Interactive user access the system only through the Web service.
• Non-interactive users are often used when writing service-to-service code because they do not use up a license
• CRM Online allows for five free non-interactive users
• Administrative users has access to the Settings area but does not have access to the Sales, Marketing, and Service areas
• Support User is created by the Dynamics support team
• Access Modes (AccessMode): Administrative, Non-Interactive, Read, Read-Write and Support.
• CalType (License Type): Administrative, Device Full, Device Limited, Full, Limited.
• Access is based on the roles assigned to the user plus the roles assigned to the team that a user is a member of.
• Users and teams can own records if the OwnershipType is set to OwnershipTypes.UserOwned
• Use of teams is optional in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• To disable a non-interactive user, update the user record changing the accessmode value to any other value. The user will be disabled automatically.
• Each user set of privileges is a union of all privileges from the user’s roles and privileges from all teams’ roles in which the user is a member.
• You can use a team to efficiently share business objects with a group of users.
• Disable a user if they leave an organisation to keep their records for further use.
• Disable users on vacation to remove them from workflow processes (good practice).
• Disabled users do not use licenses.
• You can call the WhoAmIRequest message to find out the organization or business unit for the currently logged on or impersonated user.